Two things I really want to see in a weblog aggregator (geekery)
by at 6:29 PM
- Entry aggregation. Lots of feeds I subscribe to happen to carry many of the same item, but there's no one feed of the group that I can have which definitively contains everything else (e.g. MacRumors, MacNN, Ars Technica, and the Register all often carry the same stories, but they also carry a lot of different stuff from each other). Looking at the text of two entries and seeing if they have certain lengths of phrases in common would be exceedingly nice. Then on the aggregation page it could just show the text they share in common (or try to figure out which one is the most definitive, e.g. by looking at which one gets linked to the most or which one came chronologically first or whatever) and then provide an easy way to inspect the others (which could be sorted by, say, Levenshtein distance)
- Automatic subscription to feeds that you come across (e.g. for comment feeds or for webcomics or whatever), paired with intelligently altering the poll rate based on frequency of updates (after a year there's no reason to poll every comment thread on a weblog every hour). Or at least the second one, paired with an easy "subscribe to feeds" button (which many browsers have already). It'd be nice if more things used RSS for comment notification (email notification sucks!) but I'd hate to see the web die because 10 million aggregators each poll 10 million pages hourly.
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